Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together
"Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together" was commissioned for xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique, founded in Montreal in 1996.
In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren't sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn't see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn't got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything.